Christmas update

We are trying to enjoy the holiday season in spite of the pandemic, and are doing well enough. Our neighbours have definitely put up more Christmas lights/decorations this year which makes evening walkies more enjoyable. There are a few areas that are almost up to American levels of festive. 

And like every year, I've made another xmas music mix to share: 2020 Xmas mix

We're eating well too. No reason not to make multiple festive meals so we're having another turkey dinner this weekend and will do more baking. It's amazing we haven't gained weight but fast days are working for me, and Mark seems to get away with just running every once in a while. Hamish eats well too, but also gets 3 walks a day on average at the moment so.....

Nothing exciting to report. We're fine, but bored. Vaccines coming and we intend to shelter until we have it. It would be foolish to risk catching the virus now. 

I'm back bitches!

I forgot my password (and login) a long while back and then just didn't have any real interest in blogging. It now seems more and more necessary to quit facebook though, so I've spent the last 10 days in a security spiral with Google trying to get this account reopened as it was linked to my Australian (now defunct) phone number. 

Nothing much to blog about though - other than dystopian elections and pandemics. The UK is about to go back into a second national lockdown starting this Thursday. Hopefully there will be good news from the US by then. I fear for the world if the fascist is re-elected. 

Pandemic 2

Thought I would expand on the whole coping with the pandemic thing.  Plus, I'm pondering doing a move back here and dropping Facebook.  FB has given me contact with many long lost friends but they have been sh*tty lately about facilitating propaganda, and I just don't feel like I'm keeping a record of my life there.

We really we could be back in the US to help and support and hell, just see family.  But family members who are in the States can't do much to support each other these days anyway, so the times are what they are.

Our work situations settled really quickly -- Marjorie was already working from home for much of the time when the call to settle in place came down, and my company, while they had been resistant to the idea of people working from home during the previous year I've worked there, were able to adapt quickly to everyone WFH.  Since we do a massively multiplayer online game, business has been booming since the lockdown, and having everyone work from home hasn't been much of an impact at all.  I do miss working in our nice office, but working at home has its perks too.

Marjorie has taken over the upstairs bedroom that we converted into an office, and is on video conference calls much of the day, doing admin work for the NHS.  I'm downstairs at the dining room table, where I have my work MacBook (gah) and monitor set up, and spend a lot of time conference calling as well.  This lets me man the back door so Hamish can come and go as he pleases, between his morning and evening walks.  He doesn't quite get everything that's going on, but he's mostly happy to have us home.  He doesn't quite understand why we aren't going to the pub anymore though.

Thursday evenings at 8 pm is the Clap For Carers time, when everyone goes out and applauds for a few moments, then basically catches up with each other (from an appropriate distance).  Hamish thinks it's Clap For Hamish.  We let him come out with us without a lead, perhaps foolhardily, but the clapping probably scares off the cats, and he always just ends up sitting on the end of the driveway and sniffing the air.

Weekends we've been trying to do a bigger family outing.  We've gone through town a couple of times, once on bike and once with the dog on foot, but mostly stay confined to our village.

I have a new hobby!  I had dabbled in it before, but probably thanks to the lockdown, now it's serious.  I've started using my exercise outings to visit area cemeteries (we have a dozen or so easily reachable) to take pictures, which I then upload to findagrave.com and transcribe, for the benefit of genealogists and historians around the world.  I've done 217 graves as of now, and it feels like I'm just getting started.  It's a perfect mixture of intellectual and aesthetic stimulation for me -- the churchyards and cemeteries are historically interesting, but I think consistently beautiful as well.  The graves are of course poignant reminders of mortality, but I'm also learning so many random things about British history, and from the ground up.  There are historical records for some of these sites already, but they are grossly incomplete and spotty, and almost no pictures.  So it feels like any effort that's made helps.  So much of this history is just fading before our eyes, and I mean that literally -- many graves feel like they are on the brink of readability, and to record them now is to rescue them from obscurity!

Pandemic

Reading the memoirs of others is always best when they are talking about historical events that the author lived through.  The current coronavirus pandemic certainly seems to qualify, so here I am back blogging again.  (I also hope to be able to look back and remind myself what it was like, many years down the line.)

Marjorie and I have now been working from home for about six weeks, and are (for the most part) following social distancing guidelines laid down by the scientists (which is a much sounder way to go than the ones laid down by the government).  Local businesses are mostly shut down, except for groceries, food deliveries, and the post office.  Currently we're allowed an outing per day, for exercise, and as Hamish gets two walks a day, that means we walk him in shifts.  As I also want to go for runs, I grab him at the end of my runs for a cool down walk (he's too slow and distracted to take with me).  We have a beautiful local park (Milton Country Park) that we frequent, though we try to time it to avoid the crowds.  Most people are good about using it, but there are still too many people wanting to picnic, socialize, linger on park benches, etc., and there is little enforcement of the lockdown rules.

We're trying to do just a big grocery shop every couple of weeks to minimize exposure, and have only gotten food delivered a couple of times (leaving good tips).  We're probably doing a bit much online shopping, but we're at least trying to buy from independent businesses and put a little something back into the economy.  We know we're lucky that we could both keep our jobs and work from home.

So trips and plans have all been put on hold, but things are fine mostly -- just a bit boring, at least as long as we're not thinking about what could happen.  We're worried about everybody we know and love, and how tragic things could become.  We're worried about getting it ourselves -- it's such a weird virus and no one seems safe from it.

It's kind of hard to imagine how we're going to come out of this, barring some sort of vaccine.  Things will open up again at some point but Marjorie and I and most people we talk to have no plans to go rushing back to the pub the day the government says we can.  We at least aren't seeing the sort of idiotic protests that are happening in the States about it all being a hoax or conspiracy to take away rights.  And we're happy to have a national health service and coordinated response from the government, even if they've been bled dry in recent years.  We're just hoping we won't need it.